Oct ’08 TFS Power Tools are Available!

Yes, I know it’s November now 🙁 We had originally planned to release them about two weeks ago but an early release to our MVP showed us that we still had work left to do to really get it ready. You can read about all the cool new stuff in this release here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/10/01/preview-of-the-next-tfs-power-tools-release.aspx. We think the release is in pretty good shape but as I say in that post, this is a very big and very broad release. As such we are expecting to have to do some mop up work in the next update. At this point I’m expecting that to happen in late Jan or early Feb. In the mean time, please let us know about any issues you hit so we can investigate them and fix them for the next release.

In addition to the major new features I listed in the post above (Team Members, Windows Shell Extension, Power Shell support, and Custom component download, tfpt unshelve /undo and BPA improvements), we have added a couple of new things. The include:

tfpt searchcs – A new tfpt command that allows you to search for checkins, filtering by date, user, path, and string matches in the comment and checkin notes. It’s a very handy tool if you are looking for a checkin but aren’t 100% sure what you are looking for.

Improved setup – The new setup now installs for “all users” rather than just the current user. This was necessary because the Windows Shell Extension can only be installed for “all users”. That’s not really an improvement, just a change 🙂 The improvement is that the setup will now automatically uninstall previous Power Tool versions (including Dec ’07, Mar ’08 and Jul ’08). This will eliminate one step when updating your Power Tools builds. One complication comes with the change to “all users” install. If you’ve installed previous versions using your user account and you install the Oct ’08 release with the same user account, everything will work. However, if you installed the previous version with a different account than the one you install the Oct ’08 release with, it will not work. You will need to log in to that account and uninstall the previous version. We had serveral MVPs hit issues with this where they had previous installs on other user accounts and had forgotten about it.

Oh, and one more thing I want to point out – the Power Tools can be installed and run on 64-bit clients. This includes the Windows Shell Extension (which means the Power Tools include both 32 and 64-bit versions of that component).

Dang, I should have mentioned it. Because the impact of the shell extension can be system wide, we decided to not enable it by default. When you run setup, you have to explicitly choose the option to install it.

History is one of the next things to add. Expect to see it in the next release. I’ll look into the Vista theming, thanks.

I can see a Team Foundation Server option in the Windows Explorer context menu but the sub menu just lists "Reconnect to server".

When I select it I just get a dialog box with a message reporting that it is unable to connect to Team Foundation Server. Everything TFS related works as expected in Visual Studio. So not sure what is missing.

Gurb, is it possible that you connect to TFS with something other than your Windows credentials? Right now the shell extension only supports Windows credentials. We’ll be adding support for explicitly providing credentials in a future release.

Nice work guys. I did not have any issues with the install on two machines, and logging out and back in was enough for getting the Windows Shell extension to work.

There seems to be something major lacking from the Windows Shell extension though – no support for "View History…". People who are used to TortiseSVN may find this very annoying, because almost everything is there, except the capability to view the history of a file or folder. Is that feature planned for a future release?

Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 week on Channel 9 The week of November 10th is Visual Studio

9 years ago

hempels

Not sure it’s worth spending a ton of time on, but I wanted to point out that (at least) the Shell Extensions do not "work" when the workspace mapping in TFS is a logical (but not literal) match for the actual filesystem path to the source controlled files.

E.g. After I already had workspaces configured in TFS, I moved some source files to a different drive and created directory junctions to point to the new locations. Everything has handled that move swimingly until I tried the new Shell Extension. After changing the TFS workspace mapping, the extension works as expected.

9 years ago

burton

just was looking at the new Alerts node in Team Explorer. i noticed that in the alert designer, the "Alert Definition:" label is painting over the top of the toolbar. I’m running 120dpi.

Windows Shell integration is nice but needs lots of UI polishing. Line spacing of text is smaller than line spacing of standard context menu. Also icon and overlay quality is beyond Windows standards and icons are 1-2 pixels clipped from right.

But nevertheless, great job !!!

9 years ago

crowleym

The collection of presence information fails on my machine with the following error:

Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {B69003B3-C55E-4B48-836C-BC5946FC3B28} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: 80004005.

The team members node hangs with "working…", then the error appears, and then all of the collaboration features are disabled.

I’m running in a workgroup, but got passwords setup to auto connect to the TFS server on the domain.

9 years ago

Rob Siklos

I also have the same error as crowleym, but the error code is 8007000e (instead of 80004005).. Same GUID though.

Seems related to Live Messenger, so I set the Collaboration Provider in "Personal Settings" to "none", and the error no longer appears.

9 years ago

Rob Siklos

For some reason, none of the TFS powershell commands are available to me. (e.g. "help *-tfs*" returns nothing).

I’m using Windows XP, maybe that makes a difference.

Any ideas?

9 years ago

mrbelk

Same error as crowleym, but when I disable the Collaboration Provider, I can no longer bring up the "Personal Settings" dialog box. I get an "Invalid Argument=Value of ‘3’ is not valid for ‘Selected Index’ popup.

9 years ago

robogob

Same error as crowleym too (every member of our team is having the same error 🙁 )

I get the error when clicking on Reconnect to Server as well. Looking in the event viewer shows an error where the TFSShellExt is trying to connect to an old instance of TFS that we were using previously but whose trial license has expired.

How do I get it to point to our production TFS server?

9 years ago

Jack Vinitsky

Nevermind…I was using a local folder that itself was part of a workspace from our old server. Disregard my prior post.

Editing the PersonalSettings.config to chenge the element to <CollaborationProvider connection="<None>" /> , It does not work for me.

When I re-start VS, error shows again. Personal settings now can be opened, but instead of showing <None>, again appears Windows Live Messanger. It seems that the configuration file , even that is changed , is re-generated again.

Also, I have Xp and if I set "Run as" administrator for the messenger application, it does not work for me.

It seems that this collaboration feature has not been tested enought and can not even be uninstalled or deactivated !

I hope this gets solved soon. If not, I will uninstalled the whole Power tool.

we are planning to use TFS at our company for other IDEs than Visual Studio and use the TFS Power Toys Shell Integration for Source Control with TFS.

But we would really need the feature, that a file is automatically checked out for edit whenever any application changes that file. Is this somehow possible? This is really critical to us.

I would be very grateful for any suggestions!

– Daniel

8 years ago

Gary Menzel

Just a final word on the PersonalSettings.config.

I had the same problem. Editing it to be an empty string DOES WORK.

I found when I edited each of my projects they were added to the PersonalSettings.config file but the <CollaborationProvider/> tag is global. Changing it from having "{none}" to "" AND restarting VS seems to fix it for all loaded projects.

You can open up each project and see that there is no Collaboration Provider.

Daniel, no, I’m afraid there’s no "auto checkout on modification feature". You can overwrite the writable file and later go back and check it out (checking a file out does not replace it from the server).

We will be looking at eliminating the requirement to do a checkout in a future version.